The State of ReactOS's Crazy Open Source Windows Replacement 208
jeditobe writes with a link to a talk (video recorded, with transcript) about a project we've been posting about for years: ambitious Windows-replacement ReactOS: "In this talk, Alex Ionescu, lead kernel developer for the ReactOS project since 2004 (and recently returning after a long hiatus) will talk about the project's current state, having just passed revision 60000 in the SVN repository. Alex will also cover some of the project's goals, the development and testing methodology being such a massive undertaking (an open source project to reimplement all of Windows from scratch!), partnership with other open source projects (MinGW, Wine, Haiku, etc...). Alex will talk both about the infrastructure side about running such a massive OS project (but without Linux's corporate resources), as well as the day-to-day development challenges of a highly distributed team and the lack of Win32 internals knowledge that makes it hard to recruit. Finally, Alex will do a few demos of the OS, try out a few games and applications, Internet access, etc, and of course, show off a few blue screens of death."
BSOD as a replacement feature? (Score:5, Funny)
Making it not crash would be moving away from emulating windows, I guess?
Re:BSOD as a replacement feature? (Score:5, Funny)
If they're getting BSOD's aren't they about 90% complete?
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The BSOD came into being as a feature of Windows NT and has NEVER existed in the DOS derived versions of Windows (3.1, 95, 98, ME)
Oh, so very wrong. [wikipedia.org]
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I can smell the burn from here.
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So what else would you call a screen with a blue background that indicates your operating system dying?
My family had ME. Occasionally it would boot directly to a blue screen.
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> My family had ME. Occasionally it would boot directly to a blue screen.
Do you work for the department of redundancy department? When you first mentioned you had Me, you did not have to mention it booted to BSOD.
Sheesh. ;)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzAQu23t19A [youtube.com]
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Like it or not but the reason why Linux is lower than the margin for error on the desktop is because WINDOWS is stable and LINUX IS NOT.
That's rank bullshit and you should know it. I have never in ten years of using it see Linux crash or show any unstable behavior ever. I've seen X crash once or twice while shutting the computer down but that's all. Bluetooth works flawlessly without having to install drivers and programs like you have to in Windows. Likewise wifi.
Yeah, if you try to use a server distro as
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Strange, on the planet where I live and have a job with servers of both linux and windows, the ms windows sometimes need rebooting.'
I notice there are many stable mobile devices not running windows but the linux kernel
Re:BSOD as a replacement feature? (Score:4, Informative)
> I have never seen a Linux Install work out of the box. NEVER. And by work I mean you actually have something that you don't have to install drivers, compile code or update things before you can use it. You want a GUI? That's 4 hours of compiling things, and then you have to futz with closed source drivers that only work on one specific kernel version or hope the open source drivers even implement half the functionality of the windows version. That is NOT working out of the box.
Try using a distro newer than 2001 releases.
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First link: three years old. Accelerated or not, my ten year old tower loads a page faster than my three year old Win 7 notebook.
Second link: Linux != Ubuntu even though Ubuntu == Linux.
Third link: SEVEN years old. Your info is REALLY out of date. It's like you're arguing against Win8 using an article about Vista.
At the end of the day if EVERY SINGLE RETAILER ON THE PLANET avoids your product like an STD even though it would allegedly save them piles of money?
But it doesn't save them piles of money. The pit
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How does one post an entire operating system install to YouTube? Do a video capture of the install process? Because I'm pretty confident I can pull that off without any errors. I'll do you one better and even install it as a dual-boot and still be able to boot Windows.
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Q. Father, please tell me, is it a sin to use Windows 8?
A. No dear child, using Windows 8 is not a sin, it is a penance.
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So basically, your post can be condensed to: "Yes."
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bigger than margin of error, Linux Desktop has about half the market share of Windows Vista (1.6% vs. 3.3%) Which is also the same as market share of Mac OSX 8D
People were forced to take the Window 8 with new machines, those who can choose will take the 7 every time. That's the funny thing about any win 8 market share numbers, 80% of that are pissed they have it. I work with mostly Windows IT professionals and the ALL say windows 8 is rubbish.
I speak as user who had choice. I have Win 7 in a vm
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My 7 install has an odd tendency to panic over the graphics driver right about once every 6 months. But other than that, yes, pretty stable.
Good number (Score:4, Funny)
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Does it come with a Ballmulator? (Score:5, Funny)
Will there be a Ballmer emulator as well? I could use one of those in my stock market crash simulator.
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I can make something yell "Developers!" 37 times, make terrible decisions, and even throw chairs (as errors), but how do you simulate the sweat?
ReactOS takes an initiative (Score:3, Informative)
Aleksey Bragin, the project coordinator writes [reactos.org]:
"Monstera is a new implementation of a memory manager (along with a cache manager) compatible with the ReactOS kernel at source code level and providing the same binary compatible Native API through a lightweight wrapper. Monstera is implemented in a subset of C++ programming language.
Key ideas:
1. Object oriented language for object oriented kernel. When NT was implemented, C++ wasn't that good.
4. Don't drift away too much. It's still based on NT architecture, but think of it as if Microsoft Research would decide to reimplement NT in C++ for fun."
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implemented in a subset of C++ programming language.
Doesn't C itself technically fit that criteria?
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implemented in a subset of C++ programming language.
Doesn't C itself technically fit that criteria?
No, not even close. For this to be true, a necessary (but not sufficient) requirement is for every syntactically valid C program to also be a syntactically valid C++ program. This is obviously not the case: for example, C allows the use of "new" as an identifier, while C++ does not. I'd wager that most C programs would not even build with a C++ compiler unless the writers specifically put in the effort to make it work.
There are many other differences, and over the past 20+ years C and C++ have been diver
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As far as I'm aware, 'new' is in C++ and not C, which proves my point so far....Plus, there've been articles in here with people talking about writing "C++" that is compiled as C++ and by the (a) C++ compiler, but is basically C, if you don't use all the new class stuff etc. etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_(C++) [wikipedia.org]
(Disclaimer: I have done C++ programming but not C. I only know some of the differences academically.)
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Oh wait, "new as an identifier". Sorry, misread that :(
Re: ReactOS takes an initiative (Score:4, Funny)
That may be true. But any smart person who thinks C++ is a bad language is probably making money using a different language.
Ionescu (Score:2)
I had always assumed that Alex Ionescu was Romanian. But he says he was born in Canada in this video.
ReactOS is a good name (Score:2, Insightful)
You know that Micro$oft will "react" quite badly to this. It's one thing to be Linux where the look and feel is totally different, but if you manage to get a reverse engineered solution for Windows even close to viable, the long knives will come out.
I foresee one of two things happening... 1. The project fails because it is TOO large for the possible gains it could provide and takes too long to get working. 2. The project is successful but M$ kills it by FUD and actual legal action. Both of these are eq
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The ReactOS project is very likely OLDER THAN YOU...
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I seriously doubt it.. I'm older than Bill Gates..
Re:ReactOS is a good name (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet you write like a 15 year-old...
Nothing you've said about it hasn't been repeated innumerable times, over a decade ago.
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And yet you write like a 15 year-old...
Ouch... That hurts dude...
Seriously? I'm an electrical engineer turned programmer, I'm lucky I *can* write..
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To make things worse, someone modded-up my little rant, in agreement, almost immediately. Nothing I can do about that.
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Yea.. That modded up thing hurts.. ;).
But, what's the meaning of the current 5 on my original post then? LOL
... I'm done with the flame throwing now, though I suppose you are not....
Flame ON!!
Re:ReactOS is a good name (Score:5, Interesting)
3. States targeted by the NSA find it more viable than switching to linux, fund it to completion, and most of the world stops using Microsoft's version.
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ReactOS is attempting to reimplement an OS that is EOL'd and 10 years old. I dont know that Microsoft cares too much.
the long knives will come out.
Good luck with that, clean-room reverse engineering is legal.
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clean-room reverse engineering is legal.
But patent infringement is not.
Just remember that all M$ has to do is portray a believable story that using something is possibly a problem for the user. It's called FUD, and in this case would be easy.
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Just ignore it. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an oddity, but why do we care about this project anymore? It started out back in '96 to be a clone of Windows 95. Then it was switched to be an NT4 clone. And every few years they update the website to say it's to be a clone of some newer version of Windows.
Meanwhile, it's still pre-alpha, (barely) runs on almost no hardware, and runs almost no programs. Wine is in a far better state. And in recent years, Windows' dominance has even been severely undermined by Android, providing a real, viable alternative OS that happens to be free and open source. And Linux has long since usurped it as the #1 server operating system. So after a couple decades of delays with almost no progress to be seen, ReactOS is on the verge of outliving its usefulness, before it ever started. Sort-of like GNU HURD for Windows fans.
There's plenty of open source OS projects out there that /. doesn't report on twice a year. Let's make ReactOS one of them!
Re:Just ignore it. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Just ignore it. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the NT6 kernel is the base for Win Vista/7/8/8.1. Of course that was based on the NT5 kernel from 2000/XP/2003. And that was based on the NT4 kernel from NT4.0. And the NT3.5 kernel is the base for NT4. And the NT3.1 kernel is the base for NT3.51.
And all of this has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. Regardless of what was based on what... ReactOS keeps changing their targets, and not getting anywhere.
Re:Just ignore it. (Score:4, Insightful)
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It didn't change in a big way. Internally the version number went from 6.1 to 6.2, which does reflect the amount of change that took place under the hood.
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ReactOS keeps changing their targets, and not getting anywhere.
So does Windows itself, or any other evolving project.
Re:Just ignore it. (Score:5, Insightful)
You know that both projects share a lot of code, right? Wine is in a better state because it's solving a smaller problem, and everybody (including ReactOS) is focusing on that smaller problem.
We may need ReactOS in the future for the same reason we need DosBox now. There is a huge amount of code that targets Win7 or lower, and won't be ported to the braindead, sorry, NEWER versions.
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Wine will do that job just fine... You only need ReactOS if you *want* to use video/audio/chipset/etc. drivers written for Windows.
Just complete it (Score:3)
Good point, but this project, if successfully implemented, is more likely to catch on than the gazillion Linux distros out there, given that:
Only thing I think - this project should have 2 parts -
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But is it more likely to catch-on than Android?
They're targeting XP. There was a 64-bit version of XP, too. Re-targeting Windows 7 is exactly the kind of thing I expect them to do, but is a horrific and pointless idea all-around.
And you're still pretending this two-decades old project is going
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Android is a different market altogether. Let's not pretend that it's gonna take over the desktop.
For good enough, we're talking about markets that have critical mass. XP-64 never had critical mass. So only a win32 should be targeted @ XP. For win64, Windows 7 is where it's at, so any win64 projects should target Windows 7. We've all seen the market reaction to Windows 8, so this project would do fine by ignoring it altogether.
A company that does this would be doing one of any number of ReactOS di
Re:Just complete it (Score:4, Interesting)
Android devices are already displacing a large number of desktops. There's little difference between a large tablet with a keyboard, and a desktop (or laptop, actually).
With rather full-featured and mature browsers, office suites, printing support, and a vast array of available software, I fully expect Android to continue encroaching on desktop computer usage. There is NOTHING to prevent it from doing so, over time as legacy Windows apps (slowly) die off.
And what do you plan to use your open source Windows 7 clone OS for, two decades from now?
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They've been working away for over 10 years without reaching beta and now you want them to do two different products at the same time?!
32-bit && (Addressable_RAM .GT. 4GB) == wi (Score:2)
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The Lenovo X-series tablets have been available with an "outdoor display." I have an X230 on my desk with such a thing. You don't get "touch" but it still works with (and comes with) a Wacom stylus.
Re:Just ignore it. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know. I feel like it's an interesting project that deserves some attention. It'd be great if the project got some support and reached a usable state, but it seems like they're learning interesting things-- both about Windows itself, and about the process of trying to reverse-engineer a complex system. Personally, I'm willing to have an occasional /. story that isn't very relevant so long as it's interesting.
Also, the potential value that WINE can't provide is if they can reach a level of running with good driver compatibility, i.e. if you have some old unsupported hardware with a Windows-only driver, there's the potential that you could use that driver and thereby still use the hardware. Sure, it's a very niche use, but I think it was part of the intention of the project.
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I think it's cool and I still care, even if everybody else wants to ignore it. It may never get anywhere, but I like to know that it's going on and hear the status twice a year or so. Same for GNU Hurd, although I don't think I've heard much about them in at least five years.
Also, while I'm sure Android is challenging Windows' dominance overall, it doesn't seem to be doing so on desktop machines in my office, so it's still a reality for me. I doubt ReactOS will be done in time to change that during my ca
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There's a BIG difference. Essentially an OS is a layer between applications and bare metal, so drivers are needed to run it on every piece of hardware. Linux started to take off when the hardware manofacturers took it seriously and started contributing drivers to it.
ReactOS does not have this problem because all Windows drivers will eventually run natively on it.
Wow, this is still around? (Score:2, Interesting)
Gotta hand it to the guy, he's got some tenacity.
A spin-off of a previous attempt to clone Windows 95, development started in early 1998, and has continued with the incremental addition of features already found in Windows.*
[*] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS [wikipedia.org]
Re:Wow, this is still around? (Score:5, Insightful)
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FreeDOS got to BETA releases in 4 years.
ReactOS is still calling their code "alpha" after two decades, and even that's being too kind...
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Yes, but FreeDOS also didn't have a project like Wine to start from. And if pre-alpha in two decades sounds good to you, just WHEN do you expect to see a nice, stable ReactOS release? Will we still be able to find 32-bit computers, or will this be after the heat-death of the universe?
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It's not pre-alpha; in fact they're .3 away from beta release. It says it's alpha in bold type right on their front page. Of course, that probably means another 6+ years, but...
Re:Wow, this is still around? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, it says alpha, but I've used it, and I don't believe it's fair in the slightest. They could call the next snapshot "stable" if they were delusional enough, but that wouldn't make it truely reflect the state of the project.
ReactOS is still a mess, that (poorly) supports very little hardware, runs far *FEWER* apps than Wine, and is utterly missing most everything.
If I had much interest in Windows, I would completely change their approach around... I'd start writing kernel patches that would allow Linux to load Windows device drivers. And then I'd write a GUI/front-end that makes a Linux/X11 system look and operate just like a Windows system, with all software running through Wine. That would get them most of the way there, in short order. And if they gain any popularity with their Linux-based Windows work-a-like, then it would drive a LOT of interest in Wine. Then they'd only need Wine improvements to get their OS up to parity with Windows.
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FD was also actually a viable replacement for *DOS long before the somewhat arbitrary 1.0 line was drawn. Last time i looked ReactOS really isn't usable except as something cool to play with.
Don't misunderstand, i think its a great idea, but with out enough people behind it to make it go anywhere.
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samba tng ported to w32 (Score:5, Interesting)
reactos was the real reason why i ported samba-tng to w32, using mingw32 to compile it up. worked absolutely great. unfortunately you cannot effectively run samba-tng/w32 under windows (without changing the port numbers) because the ports 137, 138, 139 and 445 as well as the critical NamedPipe services are already occupied... by microsoft's implementation of SMB as well as microsoft's implementation of the critical MSRPC logon services (LSASS, NETLOGON and so on) without which it would be flat-out impossible to even log in to the box in order to see if the services were running!
likewise unfortunately because wine has had to implement MSRPC (completely independently), although it would run successfully you likewise would have to change the MSRPC pipe service names as well as the TCP and UDP port numbers of the endpoint mapper (port 135) because wine has had to implement \PIPE\winreg, \PIPE\srvsvc and many others which are *also* implemented in samba-tng.
the amount of cross-over between samba, wine and reactos at the core fundamental networking level (much of NT's design was based around networking and RPC services, even when run as a stand-alone system), is just crazy. especially when you consider that it takes about 250,000 lines of hard-core intensive c code just to get even the _fundamentals_ of MSRPC correct. it's been over twelve years so i've had to stop letting people know about the duplication of effort and just let them get on with spending their time learning the hard way that they're working on exactly the same thing... without sharing any effort between them.
there's some absolute golden nuggets in amongst the wine/reactos code. periodically - every few years - i have a go at extracting the DCOM implementation from wine - to build a stand-alone GNU/Linux + w32 DCOM library. the last person who tried that called it "TangramCOM". he forgot to commit some critical bits to the repository (such as the IDL compiler). if anyone's ever worked with DCOM at a high level (using e.g. python) you'll know that it's just stunningly easy. DCOM was - still is - why microsoft has been so insanely successful after all this time. the equivalent in the MacOS world is ObjectiveC, which achieves similar results (without the networking) at the compiler-level which is pretty ambitious and nuts but highly effective all the same.
ahh, what can you do, eh?
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windmills - chaaarge!
Not sure who the target audience would be. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not sure who the target audience would be. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is more of wishful thinking than anything else. Despite the fiasco over Windows 8, Linux is not taking over the market. People are just going for pirated Windows 7 wherever they can get them.
If this project is completed, & reasonably bug free (comparable to Microsoft), then it would be far more successful than Linux. After all, you have a bonanza of both win32 apps from XP, and win64 apps from Windows 7. The project just has to accommodate both of these - currently, it's just targeting the former. Once it's done, PC vendors would preload their PCs w/ it, slap on any commercial software they can bundle w/ it, like say QuickBooks, and then sell it in the market. Or users would download & install it, and be off to the races. After all, just about all the commercial software out there (talking about laptops, not phones or tablets) are Windows.
We have seen the success of Red Hat. Similarly, any company willing to hire developers to maintain a distro of this OS can do wonders. After all, most installations out there today are Windows, and anybody who doesn't want to be dragged kicking or screaming to Windows 8 or Server 2012 could, if this were available, go w/ it. Since it's FOSS, they have the option of hiring Windows devs and maintaining the OS in-house. Or, if there was a Red Hat like company doing this, they could get their OS & service from them. Such a company would not have to push their OS the way Red Hat would have to push Linux.
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mobile Linux might just sneak around behind and bite the desktop in the butt
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When Windows is used in the enterprise it's used generally because the stake holders buy into the commercial software model and have beliefs that systems backed by giant companies (be it Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc...) provide less risk. When a project ends up in flames at least they have a lifeline to call. Well, that is the perception. We know it doesn't really play out like that most of the time. If you're a stake holder in the other camp (lean start up, et al) then you're on an Linux based open source stack and taking advantage of the maturity of that open ecosystem. So I don't know where this would fit. I guess I could see Oracle or IBM funding it and trying to grow it to a point they could offer it as another option. Outside the enterprise Windows is just a walking dead OS.
Windows is used in the enterprise because of Active Directory, Office, Exchange/Outlook and the very long product support lifecycles.
Windows is used at home because it's what they use at work, it's what they've learned to use, it's what came with the computer, it has Microsoft Office and it has games & DirectX.
For all the progress cloud based software, WINE, Libre Office, various Linux driver projects, et al have made and for all the dramatic improvements in Linux's usability, Windows is still the d
PDF available? (Score:5, Insightful)
At 480p the text is kind of hard to read ...
Interesting to see their testing methodology and how their massive code base broke a lot of build systems!
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft deliberately made the architecture of Windows so byzantine, baroque, and spaghetti-like that even their own in-house staff of tens of thousands of developers could barely make sense of it
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:5, Informative)
Apart from when there is direct evidence of malice on Microsoft's front.. of which there has been plenty. They've even been convicted for anti-competitive behaviour.
David Cole and Phil Barrett exchanged emails on 30 September 1991: " "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'" Microsoft had several methods of detecting and sabotaging the use of DR-DOS with Windows, one incorporated into "Bambi", the code name that Microsoft used for its disk cache utility (SMARTDRV) that detected DR-DOS and refused to load it for Windows 3.1
( a href=http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/>source article )
The article continues in that vein for quite a while..
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:4, Interesting)
Some MS shills out there today...
I remember trying DR DOS with Windows., and the "error" messages.
I also remember installing some windows variant on a machine that had OS/2, and certain "messages".
If I had gone for the suggested defaults, the install would have wrecked my OS/2 installation.
They had some tricky wording about the partition ( the one with OS/2 on it ) probably being empty and how I would increase available disk if I "reclaimed" it...
Sleazy is what it was. You can like MS if you want to, but don't be childish with your mod points,
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone remember one of the earliest Windows dev kit? The one that came on 3.5inch floppys. I seem to remember there were 20 of the leetle buggers. And it came with a tall stack of pretty useless books too.
After I realized there were three duplicate functions for each and every action, and that the parameter list was different for the three different implementations, I returned to Unix and swore that uSoft had NO idea what it was doing.
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft deliberately made the architecture of Windows so byzantine, baroque, and spaghetti-like that even their own in-house staff of tens of thousands of developers could barely make sense of it
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
... but don't rule out malice.
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:4, Insightful)
Malice: the Windows Registry.
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:4, Interesting)
The name was originally an acronym for "Poor Obfuscation Implementation", referring humorously to the fact that the file formats seemed to be deliberately obfuscated, but poorly, since they were successfully reverse-engineered.
The other acronyms in the project, such as HSSF (horrible spreadsheet format) are equally revealing.
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A person of average intelligence wouldn't be capable of managing a project that large.
You never heard of Longhorn, did you ? :)
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Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
However, remember that any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
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I'd suggest that the choice to retain backwards compatibility for so long is stupidity. And it hasn't even worked very well. These days Linux is more compatible with old Windows apps than Windows is.
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd suggest that the choice to retain backwards compatibility for so long is stupidity. And it hasn't even worked very well. These days Linux is more compatible with old Windows apps than Windows is.
I'd suggest that it has also encouraged businesses to think very stupidly about in-house application development, which is where a lot of the problem is.
Essentially, lots of businesses created some in-house apps 10-15 years ago, which make use of quirks, design flaws, and bugs in Windows XP (or earlier) and IE6. Microsoft sat down to fix the quirks, bugs, and design flaws, only to find that they had to choose between dropping support and pissing off a huge portion of their customer base, failing to fix the flaws, or continuing to emulate the bugs for a decade in some kind of "compatibility mode". They've pretty much chosen a middle road that does a little of all three.
The problem is, this has only encouraged a mentality within businesses to think of application development as a one-off project. Management thinks, "Oh, well we'll just pay some programmers to develop a business-critical application, and then we'll be done with it. We'll get rid of the programmers, and the application will just keep working forever, because Microsoft will keep supporting all these whacky design choices." This is a very dangerous way of treating software development. Sooner or later, you're going to have to update your app. If you treated it as a one-off project, then you end up with a decade-long backlog of bugs that were never fixed, and a lack of any expertise because you've gotten rid of all the original programmers.
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I think you meant to say open source developers. Plenty of projects (X and Wayland, for example) don't care about legacy compatibility, it is just in their way...
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Assuming the right libraries are available, today's 3.12 kernel can run a binary compiled under 2.0 from 1997. ABI compatibility is maintained for userspace. It's only in kernel space where the ABI is not guaranteed. Some think a lack of kernel ABI is bad, but it's good because it encourages hardware manufacturers to gpl2 their driver instead of releasing binaries that make porting and debugging difficult. It also makes them rethink hiding their design secrets in the driver instead of on the device or i
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That, my friend, is a very good jab. Thanks for the laugh.
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:5, Funny)
Stupidity is a entropy-like quantity, not energy-like. It isn't conserved, but it can not decrease.
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What happened with windows is the least energy path all software takes. It, in fact, takes a huge investment for any long maintained program to not take this path.
It is true that Microsoft, for reasons that had to do with marketing (and also the anti competition, true) took this path quicker than was purely mandated by normal entropy laws. They also defined an "always backward compatible" policy (even when apps use unsupported, undocumented, APIs or side effects), that made it impossible to invest the (quit
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Byzantine, baroque and spaghetti-like? Maybe Bill's a disciple of His Noodliness The Flying Spaghetti Monster?
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And I've seen some amazing crayon drawings. That doesn't mean they're the best tool.
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Pissed that your Windows Phone clone of Visual Studio isn't too usable, eh?
Huh? (Score:2)
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The spelling "Solomon" has nothing to do with the other words AC tried to associate it with. The original hebrew was three letters - shin lamed mem [wikipedia.org]. Hebrew doesn't even have vowels. Crazy AC thinks the English spelling has some special connection to other English-spelled words, entirely ignoring all of the facts of history.